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August 30, 2013

One of the sole competitive advantages your business has is the
people you hire to carry out your mission. Running a company effectively now
and in the future is directly related to your ability to choose the right
people for the right roles and retain them for the right period of time. Your
ability to stay in the marketplace and stay on top hinges on how well you maximize
the returns on your people investments, leverage the strengths of your
mission-critical players, key contributors and next-level leaders, and have
them stay actively engaged and effective.

Media from the Wall Street Journal to
CNN, and several hundred CEOs with whom I’ve spoken, agree that one of the top
strategic initiatives of many companies is hiring not only new talent, but also
the right talent. It is forecast that by 2015, we will be fully engaged in a
massive shortage of hi tech and leadership talent.

After spending the week rubbing elbows
with some of Silicon Valleys best and brightest it seems to be that this
skilled labor shortage is in full gear right now. A compelling example of this
is yesterday Microsoft reported having 10,000 current job openings in the US
and 50% of those happen to be for technology roles. They have hundreds of
recruiters, contractors and staffing firms trying to help them find people and
the well is coming up dry.

The impetus for this talent “shortage”
is that there will be fewer highly skilled workers available and fewer people interested
in full-time gigs. It is a simple supply-and-demand problem.

The difference between this talent
shortage and the shortage of the late 90's talent is we had more qualified
people in the workforce, technology was certainly not as advanced,
manufacturing was still hiring and we were not yet dealing with the global
competition for these highly qualified people.

Today we are facing an extremely savvy
global talent marketplace, the results of years of a deficient STEM education
system, and technology innovation progressing at unprecedented rates.

In reality, every company I talked to
is hiring technology people right now and everyone is hurting for candidates.
Some companies feel immigration reform could help solve the problem,
other companies are giving up their "stand" for US jobs and hiring
overseas and the impetus is not because it is cheaper, it is because they can
not afford to have these long term vacancies in key contributor tech roles and
continue to flourish.

Of course, the larger organizations can begin to cut through the
problem by deploying talent across the globe where high tech talent is more
readily available yet the SMB simply lacks the infrastructure to pull that off
as a strategy. Many start-ups I spoke
with said they are utilizing companies such as Elance, or Odesk to find
contractor talent while they hunt for full timers.

Almost every company I interviewed talked about a possible solution to this
shortage being a tech job re-training or apprentice program within their companies.

There is one more significant issue
facing US companies in regards to talent and that is the shifting demographics
facing us. We are facing a 50,000,000 deficit of US workers between the ages of
26-46, therefore we need to rely on the newest workforce demographic to fill
these gaps.

Given the shifting demographics facing us,companies committed to
winning the war for talent have to get in to the hearts and minds of the
"new age" employee.

They are tech savvy, they are hard workers, they are smart and can
handle multiple roles at once; however they are not committed to staying where
they are not valued, compensated, rewarded and recognized.

These millennials want to be in charge of their own careers, they
want to know that what ever they are doing today will lead them somewhere
tomorrow, they want to make a difference and they want to matter.

Whether or not you are hiring high tech employees, no one can deny
that the pipelines of highly qualified people with specialized skills offer
slim pickings.

Here Are Some
Quick Fixes:

1. Create Your Employment Brand. Every company serious about
hiring high quality people needs to create an employment brand that has
substance behind it.

2. Adopt a Talent Mindset. Leadership must adopt and train
management to adopt a Talent Mindset, which is in essence that people are the
most important asset in the company. This shift in mindset empowers
business leaders of progressive organizations to maximize the talent of their
people. When they leverage their people’s strengths and fully engage their
work-teams, they capitalize on the brainpower of their workforce while
innovating faster, competing harder and achieving their corporate objectives
sooner.

3. Allow Job Sharing

4. Deploy a System to foster a Productive Remote Workforce

5. Establish Career Pathing for all key roles

6. Pay for Performance / Establish a meritocracy culture

7. Customize Management, Rewards and Work Life to fit the employees’
unique needs.

August 20, 2013

Employment turnover cost the US economy a trillion dollars last year. What is it costing your company? The estimated costs of a poor hire run from three to seven times a person’s salary, especially in sales or management.

With stiff competition, costs rising and margins shrinking, no company can afford $300,000 or more per bad hire.

Your workforce is fuel for the business engine.
Imagine how your business could perform if you were empowered to create the workforce you always wanted—an engaged, inspired team, in which every person is in a job that brings out the best in them.

Comprehensive Posiiton Requirement -

CPR is an innovative and powerful methodology for assessing and analyzing the role you need to fill. Quality hiring hinges on the candidates ability to execute and deliver on key initiatives in a manner that amplifies your company’s brand. We teach you to utilize pertinent data, from existing performers, from the stakeholders and from the outcomes the role is required to produce to lay the foundation for selecting the ideal job candidate.

Let’s face it most, if not all job descriptions are outdated. Performance requirements in the role are often an after thought and not brought up until a person is hired for a job. With CPR the role is the performance. We begin with understanding and articulating the purpose the role exists.

Role analysis is a process that helps you analyze and assess the real needs in the role, department and company. If your company is seeking a highly productive environment, where everyone is committed to the same goals, you must learn to hire right by beginning with the end in mind. When defining the role, you are setting clear expectations of what the position requires and how performance is measured.

August 19, 2013

Regardless of
where you find candidates, it is important to be aware of the power behind a Resume
or these days, the candidates’ Digital Identity.

How can you best
utilize the digital identity and or resume to your advantage?

In the early days of Conscious Hiring we had a Resume Red Flag check list. While many elements of that check list still
matter, the way we interpret those elements needed to shift to reflect the new
world we are living in.

It starts with
creating a match checklist before you begin screening resumes. Help yourself
out by proactively detailing out “what right looks like” so by the time you
have your short list it contains candidates with the right stuff.

Top Line Resume Quick Screening

I teach my new
recruiters to Screen candidates resumes or digital profiles for 8 elements:

The initial
screen is a once over quick screen, and for the experienced eye takes about
45-60 seconds to review. Those resumes or digital identities need to be
categorized into pile 1 & 2. The 1’s
get a more thorough evaluation and the 2’s only get attention if there are not
enough 1’s.

Profiles that do
not make the 1 or 2 pile are not worth spending any time with because they are
littered with typos, have no real information on them, the work history has no
logical progression to it, is or they are so unqualified that it would take an
act of transformation and embellishment to turn them into something appropriate
for the role.

Work History-Dive Resume
Evaluation and Scoring

Whether you are
reviewing a Digital Identity profile like Follr.com or Linked in or you are
reviewing the good old-fashioned resume; it is important to discern a match
score for what the candidate has done and how it compares what you need them to
do.

How long has the
candidate actually been doing a job where they use comparable skills and
competencies required in your job?

Is exact
experience really required or can you train a person who has similar skills
and competencies in another environment?

Breaking it down
further I have the recruiter look at each element of the digital profile /
resume for specific evaluation in each element:

Past Employment (job title,
type of work) – 30 points

Core functions – 20 points

Skills – 20 points

Accomplishments – 20 points

Education – 10 points

Total Possible Work History Score = 100

Once you are
clear what you need and what you want then you can allocate a scoring methodology
that makes sense.

Red flags

As part of your
scoring formula it is important to highlight areas for further questions, if and
when the candidate makes it to phone screen.

Long periods of unemployment
between jobs

Changing careers on an annual
basis for multiple years in a row

Multiple full time employers in
multiple disciplines every year, contracting or free agent is one thing; jumping
in and out of roles multiple times per year however reduce a person’s ability
to become proficient at anything.

The checklist also
needs to include a good amount of detail so that anyone doing the screening
located internally or externally (whether it be San Jose, Salt Lake City or
Bangalore) can screen and score resumes.

August 14, 2013

An effective business strategy needs more than an arbitrary directive from the CEO. Developing and implementing an effective strategy that moves your company objectives forward is required in today’s competitive marketplace. When that strategy breaks down it is typically due to lack of stakeholder buy in or lack of qualifed and capable talent driving the execution.

Great company leaders tell us that gaining key stakeholder alignment while developing their overall organizational is the key to a business strategy that delivers results and sustains the test of time.

All business operates around multiple cylinders that are crucial to bottom-line success.

The congruency and effectiveness of each business unit working
symbiotically with the others directly impacts your company's ability to grow
sales, strengthen customer retention, sustain financial health and optimize the
efforts of your workforce.

One of the ways you can accomplish stakeholder alingment is by bringing your team together for a Business Strategy session.

Through a series of leadership exercises, Socratic
inquiries and facilitated brainstorming you can gain alignment on the current
state (the good, the bad and the ugly) of the business.

Once you do that your team is freed up to begin brainstorming towards the ideal future state of the organization.

With good healthy discussion and some basic ground rules you will stimulate
stakeholder alignment on which objectives and goals are required to bridge the
gap between the two and ultimately, achieve success.

On a deeper level, you can evaluate the current state and the organizational barriers to growth by conducting an Organizational Assessment. Any good assessment begins with data collection. Data collection could be in the form of
assessments, interviews and/or observation; all of these tools help you and your team to better understand the current state of your business as well as help you identify any barriers impeding your organization's success.

Some of the
first areas to analyze include employee & stakeholder alignment, workforce
engagement, the leadership and management teams' strengths, weaknesses and competency gaps, as well as major business process hurdles and roadblocks.

Lastly, it is important to fully understand the team’s aptitude for executing on the critical components of
the business strategy.

Two of the best, most conclusive tools I have used as a prelude to Strategic Planning is the Organizational Health Check and the Innermetrix Leadership Assessment both which provide the reader with a diagnostic of the barriers to company and people performance. Additionally, when interpreted with an eye on the future both of these dynamic tools provide a recipe for building a highly engaged, productive and
effective workforce as well as a healthy, stakeholder centered organization.

Leadership Assessment: As a business executive it is
important that you surround yourself with highly competent, strategically
aligned stakeholders & leaders with the ability and drive to execute
on the business strategy. These days you can buy Executive
Assessment and 360 degree feedback program on every Google page. What I
recommend you look for is a single assessment that measures your leaders
in 78 areas of competency, behaviors, work styles, motivations and
emotional intelligence. When leaders are aware awake to their strengths,
they can consciously work to optimize them. Similarly, when they are
open to learning about their weaknesses they can chose how to mitigate
them and or, if needed fix them.

A holistic approach to understanding your business serves as the
first step in identifying areas that require further investigation and
development. Awareness is the first key to high performance, doing something about it is the second.

August 7, 2013

If people are the fuel for business engine, a high performing
group of people is key for business success. Creating a Talent Strategy that puts people first encourages high performance.

With studies, news anchors and special programming all geared
around the lack of employee engagement savvy business leaders are working
diligently to harness the power of employee engagement and unleash the
potential of their workforce.

Employees who are respected, valued and motivated to perform are
more productive, dedicated and satisfied on the job. While the advantages of
having happy, committed employees are well known; the best way to achieve high
levels of employee satisfaction is still a mystery and challenge for many
hiring managers and business leaders.

It’s a waterfall effect - Employees who feel valued and listened to have higher
levels of commitment; employees with higher levels of commitment typically
reinforce that commitment by being more involved with their jobs and with the
company as a whole; and employees who are more involved are typically the
organization’s top performers. In the last 18 months there have been over 2200 articles, blogs, reports and media interviews directly linking company performance to employee engagement.

Increasing employee commitment starts with learning about how an individual
feels about their job as well as their thoughts on the company, their career
and the relationship between the two. Similarly, encouraging employee
involvement and showing appreciation for it can be highly effective in steeping
employee engagement, strengthening participation, and escalating contribution
in achieving overall business objectives.

As a business leader, hiring manager or even as a member of the Human Resources
department it pays to implement specific steps that help you increase employee
involvement, unleash the spirit and passion of your workforce and ensure your
organization utilizes and retains the right people.

Create a Talent Strategy That Puts People First– Adopt a talent
mindset throughout the organization. Take the stand that people ARE the FUEL
for the business engine, then define and implement a strategy that continues to
perpetuate that belief. It starts with a
hiring process that attracts and selects the right people to move the company
forward, deliver on business initiatives and amplify the company culture. Employee engagement is about giving people
the freedom to have a greater impact on
their own job and have an influence on the overall goals and strategies of the
company. When an individual’s financial and professional success is closely
connected with the company’s success, they have more reason to sink their teeth
into producing win/win outcomes.

Customize
- Rather than have one employee engagement and retention program
that suits all, understand that among your workforce is people and people are
individuals with unique wants and needs.
For one employee, recognition might be the catalyst for job
satisfaction, for another it might be work/life balance and yet for another it
might be earning top compensation and bonuses based on achievement of
goals.

Exploit all 5 Families of Employee Retention – Employee
engagement strategies that include creating a culture where relationships
are initiated, maintained and fostered are paramount. Taking an inventory of the environment
and
making improvements that make your office a place people want to be is key.
Other retention families include support, growth and compensation.

August 6, 2013

Inventor of Conscious Hiring Margo Graziano recognized for her contribution to creating powerful corporate culture by revolutionizing the hiring experience for candidates, hiring managers and companies.

This years National Women's Entrepreneur Award for Industry Innovator is awarded to Margo Graziano for her work in staffing.

Margo is an entrepreneur who built two successful consulting businesses before teaming up on KeenHire, her latest endeavor.

She invented the practice of Conscious Hiring, a process for finding the ideal fit and match of job candidate and job. Conscious Hiring harnesses the power of science, data and real world recruiting expertise to increase the predictability of success for both candidates and hiring managers, while also improving the performance of companies that deploy it.

“In the staffing and recruiting industry there are 10,000 solutions—but nobody’s winning. Not candidates, not hiring managers, and certainly not companies. That’s what I’m here to change. Conscious Hiring is not just a platform, but an entire philosophy about how to hire the right people for the right jobs, for the right reasons,” said Graziano.

Conscious Hiring revolutionizes the hiring experience to give candidates and hiring managers power over the process and the ability to create ideal matches between candidates and positions.

The process starts with breaking down the components of a job and identifying key elements of success for both the role and the person who fills that role. Conscious Hiring matches candidates and roles with scientific precision, resulting in a better, more natural job fit, based upon 204 points of compatibility. Using Conscious Hiring, hiring managers get to see only the best qualified, highest-performing candidates who are most likely to be a great fit for the role.

Companies become more competitive and benefit from Conscious Hiring by getting better performance from employees who are more focused on creating a higher level of value, resulting in decreasing development time and faster time to market.

Margaret Graziano, creator of Conscious Hiring

Conscious Hiring is not just a platform, but an entire philosophy about how to hire the right people for the right jobs, for the right reasons. - Margo Graziano